Clearer portable ultrasound with mixed-signal

wwebb@opensystemsmedia.com — October 6, 2010

While much of the processing for ultrasound systems is done in DSP or FPGA, image quality and processing is heavily determined by how good the mixed-signal implementation out front is. New technology from National Semiconductor is enabling portable ultrasound systems to attain the image qu...

While much of the processing for ultrasound systems is done in DSP[] or FPGA[], image quality and processing is heavily determined by how good the mixed-signal implementation out front is. New technology from National Semiconductor is enabling portable ultrasound systems to attain the image quality of larger systems.

National has packed a complete eight-channel transmit/receive system into a new chipset with four ICs including an Analog[] Front End (AFE), transmit/receive switch, transmit pulser, and transmit beamformer. National claims this AFE has the highest-resolution digital variable gain amp available, with better channel-to-channel matching and higher spectral performance than analog-only solutions. An evaluation kit for the transmit/receive system includes WaveVision 5 software.